. . . . set in the silver sea Which serves it in the office of a wall Or as a moat defensive—
until they learned to unite with their courage and persistency in war some of the elements of progress in civilisation ascribed to them, they might have proved the regenerators of the continent, and reserved it for permanent occupation by races of native origin. “Wherever they went,” says Schoolcraft, “they carried proofs of their energy, courage, and enterprise. At one period we hear the sound of their war-cry along the Straits of the St. Mary’s, and at the foot of Lake Superior; at another, under the walls of Quebec, where they finally defeated the Hurons under the eyes of the French.”[132] And after glancing at the long history of their triumphs, he adds: “Nations trembled when they heard the name of the Konoshioni.”
In older centuries, while the Huron-Iroquois still constituted one united people in their ancestral home to the north of the St. Lawrence, they must have been liable to contact with the Eskimo, both on the north and the east; and greatly as the two races differ, the dolichocephalic type of head common to both is not only suggestive of possible intermixture, but also of encroachments on the Eskimo in early centuries by this aggressive race. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as probably at a much earlier date, when the Iroquois had parted from the Hurons, they became unquestionably _the_ aggressive race of the northern continent; and were an object of dread to widely severed nations. Their earliest foes were probably the Algonkins, whose original home appears to have been between Lake Superior and Hudson Bay. Nevertheless, there was a time, according to the traditions of both, apparently in some old pre-Columbian century, when Iroquois and Algonkins combined their forces against the long-extinct stock whose name survives in that of the Alleghany Mountains and river. But if so, their numbers must have then vastly exceeded that of their whole combined nations at any period subsequent to their first intercourse with Europeans. For if the growing opinion is correct that the Alligéwi were the so-called “Mound-Builders” of the Mississippi and Ohio valleys, they must have been a numerous people, occupying a territory of great extent, and carrying on agriculture on a large scale. So far as metallurgy—that crucial test of civilisation,—is concerned, they had not advanced beyond the stage of Iroquois progress. Their pottery and ingenious carvings in stone have already been noted, along with their singular geometrical earthworks which still puzzle the American archæologist, from the evidence they show of skill in a people still practically in their Stone period. The only conceivable solution of the mystery, as already suggested, seems to me the assumption of some “Druidic” or Brahminical caste, distinct from the native Alligéwi stock, who ruled in those great northern river-valleys, as in Peru; and, like the mythic Quetzalcoatl of the Aztecs, taught them agriculture, and directed the construction of the marvellous works to which they owe their later distinctive name. But for some unknown reason they provoked the united fury of Iroquois and Algonkins; and after long-protracted strife were driven out, if not wholly exterminated. A curious phase of incipient native civilisation thus perished; and, notwithstanding all the romance attached to the league of the Iroquois, it is impossible to credit them at any stage of their own history with the achievement of such a progress in agriculture or primitive arts as we must ascribe to this ancient people of the Ohio valley. To the triumph of the Iroquois in this long-protracted warfare may have been due the haughty spirit which thenceforth demanded a recognition of their supremacy from all surrounding nations. Their partial historians ascribe to them a spirit of magnanimity in the use of their power, and a mediatorial interposition among the weaker nations that acknowledged their supremacy. They appear, indeed, to have again entered into alliance with an Algonkin nation. Their annalists have transmitted the memory of a treaty effected with the Ojibways, when the latter dwelt on the shores of Lake Superior; and the meeting-place of the two powerful races was at the great fishing-ground of the Sault Ste. Marie rapids, within reach of the copper-bearing rocks of the Keweenaw peninsula. The league then established is believed to have been faithfully maintained on both sides for upwards of two hundred years. But if so, it had been displaced by bitter feud in the interval between the visits of Cartier and Champlain to the St. Lawrence.